27 July 2012

The main downloadable linked text below is “Socialism, Utopian
and Scientific”, by Frederick Engels. It is a (relatively) short text derived from three chapters of
Engels’ larger classic work, “Anti-Dühring” (which we can
therefore reasonably treat as having been covered in this course on “The
Classics”).

This text reflects to some extent upon what a “Classic” is.
Dealing with the period subsequent to the Italian Renaissance and prior to the
French Revolution, that is often referred to as “The Enlightenment”, Engels
writes:

“We know today that
this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealized kingdom of the
bourgeoisie; that this eternal Right found its realization in bourgeois
justice; that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the
law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of
man; and that the government of reason, the Contrat Social [Social Contract] of Rousseau, came into
being, and only could come into being, as a democratic bourgeois republic. The
great thinkers of the 18th century could, no more than their predecessors, go
beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch.”

Therefore what were “Classics” in bourgeois philosophy, such
as the works of the romantic philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, are not
necessarily classics for all time. What is “classic” is something that changes.
The classics for the purposes of this ten-part course are the Marxist classics,
and “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific” is a typical one.

By Utopian, Engels meant imaginary, or ideal, and therefore
typical of the early socialists such as Robert Owen, Henri de Saint-Simon, and
François Fourier. Marx and Engels respected these pioneers but also
distinguished themselves critically from them. The third part of the
Communist Manifesto of 1848 discusses the differences.

Engels begins “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific” with
the Great French Revolution that
started in 1789. From this point on we can meet the class protagonists who
allied and clashed from that time on until now, in all possible permutations:
alliances holy and unholy, strategic and tactical, marriages of convenience and
marriages made in heaven.

These classes were the feudal aristocrats; the peasants; the
bourgeoisie; and the proletariat.

This work of Engels’ has the additional benefit of
introducing the rudiments of political philosophy, and also of leading our
thoughts towards the “democratic
bourgeois republic”, which is at one and the same time the highest form of
political life before socialism - the prerequisite of concerted proletarian
action - and on the other hand is a form of the State that has to be
transcended and left behind.

Engels describes the limitation imposed upon the human
Subject by the objective circumstances, and also the possibility of
transcending such limitations. This is humanism. Humanism says that humans
build humanity within the given material world and history.

There is no great need to search for modern summaries of the
classics when the masters have themselves provided very good summaries of their
own work. Frederick Engels in particular left great summarising, concretising
texts, especially towards the end of his friend Karl Marx’s life, and after
Marx’s death in 1883.

The September 2010 SACP Discussion Document, called “Expanding
Democratic Public Control over the Mining Sector”, makes good use of “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific” to carry
a crucial point about nationalisation: That Marxists have never asserted that
state ownership, as such, is an inherently pro­gressive or socialist measure. It
quotes Engels:

“the ofﬁcial
representative of capitalist society – the state – will ultimately have to
undertake the direction of production. This necessity for conversion into state
property is felt ﬁrst in the great institutions for in­tercourse and communication – the post ofﬁce, the telegraphs, the
railways.” (En­gels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientiﬁc”, 1880).

Engels was very clear that in such cases, state ownership
was NOT about abolish­ing capitalism.

On the contrary:

“the transformation…into state prop­erty, does not do
away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces… The more it [the
bourgeois state] proceeds to the tak­ing over of productive forces, the more
does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it
exploit. The work­ers remain wage-workers – proletarians. The capitalist
relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head.” (En­gels,
ibid.)

After this
week, the Classics course moves beyond Marx and Engels to include Lenin, Rosa
Luxemburg, and Gramsci.